Structure Again!

At 04:42 PM 11/23/00 -0800, Anne Pemberton wrote:
>... When the author selects a text and marks it bold, he/she is talking 
>directly to you the user, that this is more important than the other text ...

The problem is a "cultural bias" that is so ingrained that it is very hard 
to shake.

The only reason that a selection of "bold" means "more important" is 
because the author and user have some previous agreement to that effect - 
it is not anything specifically contained in the meaning - it might just as 
well mean that the material so marked is unimportant and may be ignored, 
that it is marked for deletion, that it should be accompanied by clapping 
hands, that...

There is no more magic in "bold" in and of itself than there is in "red" in 
and of itself. The "semantics" the author would express is that this piece 
of text is "more important", the use of a particular convention to that end 
is completely arbitrary and in those cases where such intentions are 
unobtainable, they must be more specifically communicated.

*Something* about the decision to single out the selected text is 
*STRUCTURAL* and whatever choice of <tagname> the language authors chose to 
that end must not be a specific typographic convention else it is useless 
except to initiates.

If the <tagname> happens to be descriptive it might help the author, 
provided she's aware that it's a structural nomenclature and if some 
specific treatment (like using bold font) is what she wants, that can be 
done via a style sheetl

The choice of <strong> had that in mind but it could just as well have been 
<tn013> in which case she would have had to look it up, discover that it 
was a structural element that should be dealt with by giving it some 
styling for better communicating, depending on the medium ["bold" for 
print, "loud" for sound, etc.].

What isn't clear to most who argue about this is that: THE BROWSER, IN 
CHOOSING TO RENDER <EM> AS ITALICS IS USING ITS OWN DEFAULT STYLE SHEET. It 
is just making choices that seem intuitively obvious to most users - but 
it's still a style sheet!

The fact that so few people are even aware of the concept of structured 
documents is why there is often little understanding of <h1> as structure, 
despite its non-committal name. I'll lay odds that most authors consider it 
to be merely a shorthand for large, centered, bold, certain-font text 
rather than having any notion of "structure" connected with "headers".

I understand why this doesn't matter to people to whom it doesn't matter. 
Our point is that we represent a group of largely excluded people to whom 
it does matter a great deal - even if they don't know that to be the case.

It is quite true that many of us come to this dance from a point of view of 
dealing with visually impaired clients/friends but a careful study of the 
principles, including that of content/presentation separation value, 
reveals that there is a general principle herein.

The efforts to provide meaningful inclusionary procedures for people who 
have other conditions aren't deliberately overlooked - we just haven't much 
experience in those areas but are willing to learn.

--
Love.
                 ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE

Received on Thursday, 23 November 2000 17:47:02 UTC